The Trip:

The trip is now finished and we were able to make it from Whitney Portal to Red's Meadow. We were not able to complete the entire trip to Yosemite due to several reasons. These included blisters that made it difficult to walk on, ran out of time to complete the entire trip in 16 days and we were not in a position to walk the extra miles each day to catch up, and I had a medical problem that caused us to re-evaluate our remaining days.

We made the trip to Red's Meadow in 13 days, starting at Whitney Portal on July 26th and ending at Red's Meadow on August 7th. We experienced rain the first three days and except for one more day in between, we had clear skies and beautiful weather. While we had some afternoon clouds, no rain for over 9 days! Based on the accounts from the southbound hikers, we were lucky this year!

Day 5 into the trip the blisters started for me and not soon afterwards Mike started getting his blisters. He had them on the balls and heels of both of his feet and they were pretty bad. As he said, as long as he didn't have to walk on his heels or balls of his feet, the blisters did not hurt! Thank God for duct tape as we ran out of adhesive tape to cover the moleskin. In retrospect, Mike determined that he should have gotten newer shoes for the trip. My blisters were smaller in size than in previous years, probably due to the Tuf-Foot treatment, but they were still there and had to be dealt with. I also had a toe nail on the middle toe of my right foot start to cut through the skin which made for some painful down hill jaunts as this was on the one toe that kept hitting the top of my shoe!

Up and over Trail Crest and Forester Pass, I experienced a lack of energy that made it difficult to ascend these passes. I would get woozy and not have the strength to make it up the hill. Mike helped out greatly by carrying my food canister to lighten my load. I gave him the nickname of Mule after these two ascents. While I did not experience any of the classic signs of altitude sickness (nausea, vomiting or headaches), I can only think that the lack of energy up these climbs was due to the altitude. I had no problems going over the other passes along the trip that were in the 12,000 foot range. We also altered our itinerary to camp below 11,000 feet as it also seemed as if my problems kicked in with camping above this level as well. It only goes to show that you cannot take the higher altitudes of the southern JMT section lightly! Otherwise my conditioning was okay, though my ability to put in 20+ mile days was not there near the end of the trip. Maybe some more cardiovascular conditioning would have helped. Mike had done a lot of aerobics at the gym and his knee bends seemed to pay off.

We caught over 250 fish between the two of us, including over 100 golden trout. We caught goldens, hybrids, rainbows, brookies and what appeared to be a cutthroat, but alas no browns as the rivers and creeks that held the browns were flowing too fast and strong to drop our fly rods into. The golden trout were so colorful and beautiful they were amazing! They were also plentiful as well. We caught and released all of the trout we took, never to eat any of them. With the help of Steve Beck's "Trout-Fishing the John Muir Trail, we were able to optimize our stops along the way to maximize our fishing opportunities. We even had one creek crossing where the golden trout were swimming onto the path to get out of our way. Mike helped two golden's back into the creek and is including these into his total count for "catch and release". I on the other hand am not sure that counts!

The trails were full of water and seasonal stream/creek crossings, as well as obstacles along the way. In some places, the plant growth obscured the trail and made it difficult to navigate. The regular stream crossings were not difficult as they were reported to be earlier in the season. The only time we had to ford creeks or streams in our creek shoes was at Wallace, Tyndall, Evolution and Bear Creek. We could have probably found rocks or logs to get across Tyndall, but it was starting to rain hard when we got there, so we opted for the fast approach. All of the other times we were able find logs and rocks to cross the streams. This was mostly due in the later stages of the trip to the fact the we just did not want to re-apply the blister dressings again! At one point along the lower Bear Creek crossing, we ran into about 11 people getting ready to cross or putting their shoes back on after crossing, that Mike spotted a small diameter log to cross and were across in a minute each. Motivation just makes it much easier!

We saw many wildflowers this year due to the late spring! At one point near Rae Lakes we crossed a wildflower patch with wild onions that was at least 100 yards wide and 200 yards long. The pictures of these flowers do not give them the justice they deserve! We also began to notice how the colors changed on the flowers as the altitude changed. Indian paintbrushes were bright red above 10,000 feet whereas they had an orange glow below. At Lake Virginia, their colors were amazing!

The mosquitoes were not as bad for us as was being reported by the southbound hikers. We used our DEET, but never our headnets. The only times they seemed bad was when we were in the meadows or low-lying areas. We usually camped above these places to avoid them.

For a detailed account of our trip please refer to the Journals section of this site!